I am not a farker

Now that I know what a farker is, I can say that I am not one.

A recent comment from Melinda June threw me into a state of bemusement. I wasn't sure if she was calling me a f*cker in some charming British way, or what. My eldest, still high on the triumph of having passed her driving exam and gotten her first driver's license, suggested I try looking it up at urbandictionary.com. And that's how I found out about fark.com.

I must say, I view the idea of pulling stories off fark as, well, cheating. I prefer a more old-fashioned and labor intensive method of bullshit retrieval, usually starting by googling terms like "freak," "creepy," "animal attack," "naked," etc. Then there's always Rotten and The Smoking Gun, as well as the offbeat CNN page and Yahoo weird news. Law enforcement websites Officer.com and PoliceOne.com are also pretty good sources for loser stories. If I see it on one of the cop sites, I search for the original source stories.

Some of my favorite stories, like the woman who attacked someone with a dead chihuahua, or the divorced parents engaged in an ugly, ugly fight over their son's circumcision, I found after seeing or hearing about them in local media. I also have an extensive network of informants, with important branch offices in Iowa and Florida (Florida or Germany, anyone?)

It's just that I have a natural attraction to, and ability to find, offbeat stuff from the eccentric to the horrifying. That's probably part of what drew me into law enforcement: front row tickets to a non-stop freakshow, in which I'd occasionally get to play a lead part.